It’s a new year, and that means a whole lot of new popular culture, whether it’s a crop of television shows centered on female characters, like FX’s The Americans or Showtime’s Masters and Johnson, the continuation of promising franchises like J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek: Into Darkness, or even just news on who will be directing the new Star Wars movies and potentially starring as Carol Danvers in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. But every year, I like to take some time out to explore things that are missing pieces in my own spotty pop-culture education, that give context to the larger trends that are emerging in film and television, or that I simply didn’t get a chance to catch in the previous year. These are my 2013 pop culture New Year’s resolutions. I’d love to hear yours in comments:

1. Finish Homicide: Life On The Street and Twin Peaks: I got through a chunk of Homicide in 2011, and the first season of Twin Peaks last year. And I can’t stop thinking about either one of them. I’m looking forward to finishing both for the simple pleasure of watching them, and for all the things I know that watching them will let me see in the rest of pop culture.

2. Read all of the competitors in the 2013 Tournament of Books: Judging the 2012 Tournament of Books, a competition that puts all kinds of novels, written in all kinds of styles, up against each other, was one of the most fun things I did last year. This year, I’ll just be an observer as a group of talented critics tries to sort between everything from the pulp of Gone Girl to the interrogations of Bring Up The Bodies. But I’m excited to catch up with the books I haven’t read, including HHhH, The Round House, The Fault In Our Stars, Arcadia, May We Be Forgiven, Ivyland, Dear Life, Where’d You Go Bernadette, Beautiful Ruins, and perhaps most of all, Chris Ware’s Building Stories.

3. Seven Samurai. Yojimbo. Ran. Throne of Blood. I don’t know enough about Asian cinema, or about Westerns, either. So it’s time to get my Akira Kurosawa on. I’m going to start with these four movies. And I’d love your recommendations for where to go once I’m done with those.

4. Watch Hatufim: Whether you think Homeland jumped the shark this season or gained adrenaline as it ramped up to the major terrorist attack that ended this season, the show is guaranteed to remain a key part of the prestige television landscape—and shows based on Israeli programs look to become an even more important part of the network television mix. I want to go back and see where Homeland came from and watch Hatufim, the Israeli show it’s loosely based on, especially as Gideon Raff starts work on American television shows in conjunction with Homeland‘s creators.

5. Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl: One of the most common complaints about Hollywood today is that it’s hamstrung by commercial concerns, chasing movies that will make hundreds of millions of dollars, rather than ones that will recoup modest gains but make more important points. But I’m curious about what kinds of movies couldn’t get made when there was a genuine blacklist. So I’m going to spend some time this year with the movies Louise Brooks made in Europe when it was difficult for her to work in the United States.

Over at the Mary Sue, Aja Romano has a terrific piece about the redoubtable culture site TV Tropes’ decision to delete all of its content related to rape and sexual assault on the grounds that it was making it more difficult for the site to retain advertisers. She writes:

Today when you access any of these pages, you’re informed, “We do not want a page on this topic. It does not meet our content policy.”…This problem wasn’t a new one; in January, the Rape Trope index was locked due to Google threatening to block the site’s ad revenue for explicit content. This led to complaints about vanishing hentai tropes, with some users commenting that “creepy content and creepy examples” needed to go, and others questioning whether “creepy content” applied to rape tropes. At that point a user-led effort was made to rename all of the Rape Tropes so that they sounded less rapey (seriously), which rapidly turned into an admin mandate to go through all the renamed tropes and excise all creepiness.

But despite this frantic renaming/excision, either Google brought down the content policy hammer or the admins simply decided it wasn’t a battle worth fighting. When Fast Eddie noted the deletion of the trope page, he added, “There is no explanation needed beyond the fact that the topic is a pain in the ass to keep clean and it endangers the wiki’s revenues. We just won’t have articles about rape. Super easy. No big loss.”

Aja’s gone deep on the grostequeries of suggesting that eliminating conversations about rape are “no big loss.” Amy Davidson’s written powerfully in the New Yorker about the extent to which social media helped former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky’s victims see that they weren’t alone in their experiences. And as long as TV Tropes remains the predominant site for discussion of common story elements in the medium, removing discussions of rape and sexual assault means that when victims or viewers go to the site, they’ll be denied a chance to see the traditions and frameworks that shape their experiences and the stories that touch them.

Now, this is a problem for which Google is more to blame than TV Tropes. TV Tropes is hardly the only site to be affected by Google’s classification of discussions of rape and sexual assault as explicit or obscene, though it’s deeply unfortunate that they decided it was just too much effort to keep an important and powerful part of its site alive.

Rape is obscene. But that’s not because it’s dirty, or sexually alluring, something that needs to—or could be—confined to people at a certain age or a certain stage of life. Rape is obscene because it’s a violation of community norms and standards, not in some settings, but in all settings. It’s a gross, violent attack on the humanity of the victims. I would say rape is an adult topic, but children are victims, too. Part of what’s obscene about rape and sexual assault is that their existence eliminates our ability to let children live in a world that they assume is safe.

Talking about rape may involve talking about sex, but it’s not primarily about sex. A depiction and discussion of a naked woman having consensual sex, and a depiction and discussion of a woman being raped are fundamentally different things, and it’s disturbing that we’d allow algorithms that can’t tell the difference to elide sex and rape. It’s one thing to talk about tailoring content, in news or non-fiction, for ratings or traffic. It’s another to see the structures that governs profit-making online silence a discussion altogether. Ad servers who are literally providing a financial disincentive to discuss rape and sexual assault should be ashamed.

I’ve written in the past about the challenges American film and television studios face in attempting to get their products into the Chinese market, and the Los Angeles Times has a blockbuster piece out about the compromises movie studios are making to win Chinese approval:

In “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen,”a romantic comedy about building a dam in the Mideast, Chinese hydroelectric engineers showed off their know-how; the original book included no such characters. In Columbia Pictures’ disaster movie”2012,” the White House chief of staff extolled the Chinese as visionaries after an ark built by the country’s scientists saves civilization.

In fact, references to the Middle Kingdom are popping up with remarkable frequency in movies these days. Some are conspicuously flattering or gratuitous additions designed to satisfy Chinese business partners and court audiences in the largest moviegoing market outside the U.S. Others, filmmakers say, are simply organic reflections of the fact that China is a rising political, economic and cultural power.

Meanwhile, Chinese bad guys are vanishing — literally. Western studios are increasingly inclined to excise potentially negative references to China in the hope that the films can pass muster with Chinese censors and land one of several dozen coveted annual revenue-sharing import quota slots in Chinese cinemas.

Now, I have no complaint with certain things that can result from Hollywood being held accountable to non-American markets. If Chinese audiences want to see more Chinese characters—something the Times piece said happened with a college comedy called 21 and Over—and want to see them treated like actual people rather than stand-ins for stereotypes—Men In Black III apparently went through reshoots to avoid portrayals that were considered objectionable—that’s progress. Hollywood economics so rarely end up incentivizing progress.

But as the Times points out, it doesn’t stop there. Characters are supposed to speak Mandarin rather than Cantonese, because the Chinese government is trying to make Mandarin the uniform national tongue. Studios aren’t supposed to shoot in cities and give revenue to areas that have pockets of dissidents. They’re not supposed to promote obscenity, gambling, violence, supernaturalism, horrors, ghosts, demons, general supernaturalism, or disturbances of social order, all of which are pretty fantastic story drivers. That’s a lot of creative integrity to hand over. At some point, big talents are going to get frustrated by these restrictions. Even from a business perspective, there’s got to be a point at which it becomes difficult to satisfy both American audiences and Chinese censors. And while the Chinese government and Hollywood studios may believe that Chinese audiences will pay to see anything as long as it’s on a big screen, that is not necessarily a condition that will last forever.

One of the salutary effects of reading entertainment industry trade publications is that every time I get depressed about our abilities to have serious conversations about major issues in American entertainment, I get a very specific reminder of the fact that things are much, much worse elsewhere. Today’s reminder comes from India, where the Information and Broadcasting Ministry has shut down the broadcast of a movie called The Dirty Picture. While the title might suggest otherwise, this isn’t like the Scary Movie franchise (though such a thing would be pretty entertaining to watch). Instead, it’s a biopic about Indian actress Silk Smitha. And specifically, it’s about the fact that Smitha was typecast into what, by Indian standards, counts as soft-core pornography even though she garnered critical acclaim for more straightforward work. And the televised broadcast of the movie’s been shut down precisely for its exploration of themes like typecasting and the way women can get trapped in their looks:

While The Dirty Picture does not show any graphic nudity, the film had run into controversies even before its theatrical release for its bold portrayal of a struggling starlet making it big as a sex symbol. Last week, a lawyer from the central Indian town of Nagpur filed a court order seeking a ban on the film’s telecast since it “contained obscene shots.” But the High Court cleared SET to go ahead with the screening after the I&B Ministry and the Central Board of Film Certification stated that the film had been re-edited with over 50 cuts.

“Whatever is shown on TV – whether it is a film, a serial or a commercial – has to be as per the program code of the Cable Television Network Regulation Act. As per the code, films that have U/A rating can be shown on TV… Some films have adult themes and the treatment and public perception is such that even after making many cuts the film retains its mature theme,” CBFC CEO Pankaja Thakur told a newspaper defending the government’s directive to reschedule the film after 11 p.m.. But Thakur also added that the incident will force the CBFC “to look at the whole process of cutting an adult film to make it suitable to be watched by children.”

I should note that The Dirty Picture did get theatrical play, and its director, Milan Luthria, has pointed out that it’s ridiculous that an extremely edited version of the movie, which would have aired at night and with significant notices of its rating, can live in theaters but is barred from broadcast. It’s a reminder that what counts as brave and what counts as difficult discussions aren’t the same everywhere. We take for granted a lot of what we can depict and what we can discuss.

The American Library Association’s annual count of the books that people most frequently tried to get removed from school libraries and classrooms is out, and of 326 reported challenges, these were the books that raised hackles most frequently:

1)ttyl; ttfn; l8r, g8r (series), by Lauren Myracle
Offensive language; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group

2) The Color of Earth (series), by Kim Dong Hwa

3)The Hunger Games trilogy, by Suzanne Collins

4)My Mom’s Having A Baby! A Kid’s Month-by-Month Guide to Pregnancy, by Dori Hillestad Butler

5)The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie

6)Alice (series), by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

7)Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

8)What My Mother Doesn’t Know, by Sonya Sones

9)Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily Von Ziegesar

10) To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

Of course we’ve got the old favorites in there. We’ll probably know we’re a healthy, mature society when people stop calling for To Kill a Mockingbird, one of the most well-rounded, humane explorations of racism that exists, stops getting challenged. Brave New World‘s an illustration of how anxiously people can react to science fiction, in part because of discomfort it inspires about what the world might end up looking like. And calls to get Sherman Alexie out of classrooms always strike me as inspired by the same sentiments that suggest Bully might not be appropriate for teenagers—we have to protect children in fiction what other children and the world at large inflict on them in real life.

Of the more recent additions, some of the rationales for challenges are amusing. The challenges to The Hunger Games, for example, suggest that the series is “Anti-ethnic; anti-family; insensitivity; offensive language; occult/satanic; violence.” Almost all of those allegations are significant misreadings of the novel, which makes pretty clear that it would be delightful for its main characters to grow up in a world with an economy that allowed all parents to support their children without taking on extremely dangerous work, or people weren’t divided into districts that restricted their social and economic brutality. And I’d actually love to know what challengers interpreted as occult or satanist sentiments in the book, which depicts a world in which any form of religious belief is actually conspicuously absent.

I’d also suspect that Lauren Myracle’s Internet Girls series, Sonya Sones’ What My Mother Doesn’t Know (which is one of the most challenged books of the last decade) and the Gossip Girl books are challenged not just for their content, but because of what they suggest about how the Internet has changed children’s and young adult’s lives. If I were a parent, I might be anxious about the possibility that my child’s life was essentially unmonitorable, and that there was a whole frontier beyond the real world where they could get into trouble (and as someone who grew up in the beginning of that era, I know what I’m in for). Removing one source of inspiration may delay a discovery, but there’s no way to prevent it completely. Kids will poke around and get themselves in trouble online whether or not they’re inspired to start trashy gossip blogs or pick screen names that will haunt them in adulthood. Open channels of communication, whether it’s on books, or on bullying, will probably prove more effective in the long run than panics about individual books.

It is, of course, a good thing for the American movie industry that China and America have resolved their dispute over market access, and the number of American movies released in China is set to rise from 20 to 14. That’s not huge overall compared to the number of movies that come out of American studios every year, but ut Chinese moviegoers spent $2 billion at the box office last year, and that number’s supposed to rise by 20 percent this year.

There are limitations, of course—those 14 movies all have to be Imax or 3D editions of movies. So the pictures that can make it overseas are somewhat limited by what the studios are already shooting in those formats or willing to convert, and that likely means more big blockbusters rather than small but clever indies. I’m torn between wanting to see more of that money come back to American moviemakers and knowing that it’ll likely increase the profit margins on precisely the movies that don’t need the extra proof that they’re successful. Maybe I can have it both ways, and those jacked-up margins will give studios a little more permission to experiment with smart original ideas because they’ll have more of a cushion to absorb those projects if they fail.

It’s also worth a reminder that at the same time that China’s opening up its movie market, it’s banned all imported television during primetime broadcasts and issued new regulation saying that no channel can have more than a quarter of its programming be imported. Abiding by one World Trade Organization ruling doesn’t mean that China’s given up on trying to protect the growth of its domestic entertainment industry. And it doesn’t mean the regime’s about to let in a lot of entertainment that might undermine the values it’s trying to promote. If I was trying to maintain a vaguely Communist economic system, I’d be a lot more concerned about the plucky entrepreneurialism of 2 Broke Girls than the loud and goofy fantasies of the Transformers movies.